


L'enfer, ce n'est pas les autres

by cjmarlowe



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Bisexuality, Canon Queer Character, Introspection, M/M, Yuletide Treat, dichotomies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:52:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2845172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjmarlowe/pseuds/cjmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being with Dorian cauterized some of Ethan's wounds, but it didn't heal them. And of Dorian's own hurts...sometimes Ethan wondered if they were beyond the helping of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	L'enfer, ce n'est pas les autres

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eudaimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/gifts).



Ethan Chandler knows about the hurt of other people.

It's brought him across a country and an ocean so far, and eventually, he knows, it will bring him straight to the gates of hell. Perhaps sooner than later, at the rate he's going, and perhaps more literally than he'd imagined.

The many dichotomies of himself are at the heart of it. 

It's something he's made peace with, or thinks he's made peace with, though the truth is he still wishes he were anything other than what he is more often than he'd like. Some things are easier than others. Some people are easier than others. He needs his world to be honest because he can't, and every other aspect of himself to be honest just to make up for the one that always hides under the surface. He lives with the shame of the cruelties he's done, and so refuses to feel shame about things that are not shameful.

What Ethan does feel is everything else. He feels for everyone. He loves and he pities and he cares and he feels all of those things so deeply because they combat the anger, they temper it. He lets himself be hurt because it's better than hurting, and if he fails to hold the violence in check sometimes it's not for lack of trying and it's not for lack of sacrifice.

No amount of drink can keep it in check and he wouldn't want it to; all he needs is to blunt it sometimes. He needs the pain to continue to exist.

Dorian Gray is not a good idea.

When Ethan wakes in his bed it's with a pleasant ache and feeling much lighter than he thinks he deserves. But at the same time it's with the knowledge that it's easy to mistake cautery for cure, and burial for release. He's been here before, finding someone to mask the pain of someone else, and if you don't acknowledge it for what it is, it never ends well.

It's not just that, though. Dorian was gentle and attentive and rough when Ethan needed that, but he might be one of the least honest men Ethan has ever met, let alone been with. It's not a malicious deceit but a habitual one, one that runs even deeper than Ethan's own. And of Dorian's own hurts...Ethan wonders if they might even be beyond the helping of them.

Ethan knows a lot about instinct, and it's not instinct that led him to Dorian Gray; no, instinct was what led him to fight and fuck and feed without discrimination and without thought. If anything, Dorian Gray is against his instincts. Dorian was an intellectual choice in a moment when Ethan needed it, and he suspects Dorian needed it too.

But in one night he's already learnt that Dorian Gray is a hard man to read, and if Ethan hadn't known what flickers to look for in a man's eyes and demeanor when he's hiding his darknesses, he might not have seen them at all.

"You are a most delightful plaything," says Dorian, running a hand along Ethan's abdomen without so much as a flutter of his eyelashes to indicate he's awake.

"I'm no one's plaything," he says, grabbing up Dorian's hand in his own and pushing him back onto the bed.

"Everyone is someone's plaything," says Dorian. "It's one of the joys of being alive. Let me play with you a little more before you go."

"Don't be gentle with me," says Ethan, letting up his grip so that Dorian can take his lead.

"Why not?" said Dorian. "Someone needs to be."

He runs his now-free hand over Ethan's body again, gentle as a whisper, over long-forgotten scars that make a map of Ethan's past. He lets him until a shiver goes up his back, his hair standing up on end, then grabs Dorian's hand again.

"The sun's coming up," he says.

"Is it now, Romeo?" says Dorian, a faintly mocking twist to his lips. "Yond light is not daylight; I know it, I. It is some meteor that the sun exhales."

If he is in the midst of grand romance—Brona or Dorian or both—then it is most certainly a tragedy, he's not wrong about that. And yet Ethan opens himself to it, even knowing how much it's going to hurt in the end. Last night's hurts and mistakes and pleasures are all near the surface right now.

Dorian helps him forget, a little, because if Ethan feels deeply and hard then Dorian feels shallowly and secretly, and for a little while Ethan can pretend he's him. That's what Dorian promised him, after all. To be someone else, for a little while, until he can face being himself again.

Just for a little while, though. For it's because the knives glance off him that Dorian is able to cut everyone else so deeply, and that's not something Ethan could live with forever.

"Something something about a lark and a nightingale," he says, and grins at Dorian and lets his hand go one more time. This time Dorian clutches at him, rolls him down onto the bed and straddles his body fiercely. "I guess one of us can be a plaything a little bit longer."

"How delightfully non-specific of you," says Dorian. "I have a nomination in mind."

"I concede," says Ethan, and Dorian is just as hard as he hoped. Though in the midst of it, there are still moments of tenderness that are almost too much to bear.

Dorian is not bored of him, which seems like a rare and dangerous thing for him. Because Ethan does not credit his charm and depth of personality but something else that lies beneath. Something that Dorian Gray has never seen before. If he's lucky, he'll never have to see it, but even if Dorian is a lucky man, Ethan never has been.

No matter how deeply you bury something, it always comes to the surface again. It's true in romance and in treachery and in all aspects of life as he knows it. Nothing stays buried forever.


End file.
